The Star Hearth

A star hearth is a type of fusion reactor used in the Claravian liturgy. The hearth is kept in good repair by the hearthkeeper, a priestess of the Bright Way. The building that houses the star hearth is called a lighthouse, which serves as a house of worship.

In former times, the star hearth powered the homes of the faithful as well as the lighthouse itself. After the War of Dissolution, however, the custom of merely powering the lighthouse while selling the excess electricity back to the municipal power company in order to cover operational costs was imposed across Focus.

Postures and Gaits

One of the two resting positions yinrih can assume while in a gravity well. This is referred to in English as perching, and the piece of furniture is referred to as a perch. Yinrih straddle the perch on the belly as they would the branch of a tree, leaving their paws and tail to hang freely. A desk may be located under the perch, and the user manipulates objects on the desk with the freely hanging paws and tail.

This is the typical seat of a vehicle cockpit, but such an arrangement can also be found as computer workstations. The yinrih lies on his or her back, gripping a keyer in each of the four paws. Paw keyers use chords of simultaneous key presses to input text and other commands. If analog controls are present, they will be located at the base of the chair to be manipulated by the tail.

Yinrih prefer HUD specs (AR goggles or glasses) rather than screens in most cases. A pair of Google Glass-like HUD specs and a single paw keyer, possibly along with a tail gesture ring, are the typical tools that serve as a portable computer or smartphone.

In addition to perching and lying on the back, yinrih can rear up on their hind feet, preferably with the tail wrapped around something for balance. This posture allows the use of the forepaws to manipulate objects, but it is more energy-intensive than perching or lying belly up. They can also “sit” in canine fashion with the palms of all four paws touching the ground.

In microgravity, they an anchor themselves in place by wrapping the tail around a tail bar, leaving all four paws free for grasping and manipulating controls and such.

A yinrih’s rear paws are just as dexterous as their forepaws. Buttons and other controls are designed to be tactilely distinct so they can be used with the rear paws without looking, and a braille-like tactile alphabet is used even by sighted yinrih for labels on controls and small objects so they can be identified by touch alone.

Anatomical Overview

If you’ll forgive the AI-generated horror show, this is the closest I’ve managed to depicting how the yinrih look in my head, with a few discrepancies explained below.

Here are a few of my own artistic attempts at depicting them.

Humans often refer to yinrih as monkey foxes because they appear to have the head of a fox and the body of a new world monkey. They are quadrupeds with prehensile, six-toed paws and a prehensile tail. The body is covered in fur, but the palms, soles, and last joint of the digits are hairless, revealing grayish black skin underneath.

Yinrih are plantigrade, with the palms of the paws bearing their weight. Each paw consists of an inner thumb, four fingers, and an outer thumb. The tips of the digits have sharp, iron-enriched claws used for climbing and defense. There are doglike paw pads on the palms and on the underside of each digit.

They have sharp, carnivorous teeth, a whiskery muzzle with a wet nose, and erect fox-like ears.

The eyes work very differently than those of Terran animals. If human eyes are cameras, yinrih eyes are radio receivers. Each “eye” is an array of millions of nanoscopic antennas sitting on a shared ground plane that couple with ambient electromagnetic radiation like a radio. The surface of the eye is very good at absorbing visible light, making it look like the eyes are coated in Vantablack. Between these nantenna patches and their primary eyelids, there are four pairs of bandpass membranes that filter incoming light. Between these bandpass membranes and signal processing in the brain, yinrih ‘tune’ to different light spectra. They have a much, much wider visual spectrum than humans, able to see microwaves at the low end and non-ionizing UV radiation at the high end, but they can’t perceive the entire spectrum all at once.

Their senses of smell, hearing, and touch are much more acute than a human’s. They rely more on pheromones then on body language to communicate emotion. You don’t say “I feel happy” you say “I smell happy”. A yinrih’s natural musk identifies things like gender, age, and whether or not they have had children. Yinrih have expanded this olfactory communication to include complex perfumes that serve the communicative and social functions that clothes do for humans.

Having fur means they don’t require clothes for sun or cold protection, and they rely heavily on the tactile information gained through their paws, so yinrih are perennially naked and unshod.

They are arboreal, and move through the trees by brachiating (swinging hand over hand). This arboreal lifestyle dovetails nicely with living in microgravity, and there are orbital colonies of spacers who live permenantly in zero G so they can overcome the limitations of their quadrupedal stance, now having four hands instead of four feet.

One of the secrets to the yinrih’s meteoric rise up the tech tree, achieving spaceflight a mere five thousand Earth years after gaining sapience, is the writing claw. In each forepaw there is an ink sac located near the knuckle of their index finger. A duct leads from the sac to the tip of the claw, which has evolved to look and act like the nib of a fountain pen. Their ink is blue-black and smells strongly of petrichor, and carries the same pheromones as their ambient musk.

AS nonsapient animals the yinrih used this writing claw to mark territory. A written language emerged out of this scent marking behavior in parallel with a spoken language. They have historical records reaching back to the dawn of sapience, with the earliest written records being from “kindled” (sapient) yinrih who were born into otherwise nonsapient litters to nonsapient parents, only discovering their differences after leaving their litters and finding other sapient yinrih.

Paw Morphology

The arrangement of palmar pads on the forepaws is sexually dimorphic.^[1] Males have three large pads, with one pad at the base of each thumb, and another directly under the knuckles. Females have the same two lower pads, but the single upper pad is replaced by several smaller pads in order to make room for a lactation patch. The lactation patch appears as an undifferentiated patch of grayish-black skin, the same as the rest of the furless portion of the paw. When exposed to saliva, the patch begins oozing bluish-white milk.

Vulpithecine ink and milk evolved out of similar excretory structures, which is why they are both located on the forepaws, and why the milk is bluish. The milk has potent antimicrobial properties to account for the fact it’s being excreted from a surface in constant contact with the ground. Lactation is not linked to the reproductive cycle, and may occur at any time after reaching maturity. The on demand nature of lactation evolved in order to make climbing easier. If lactation happened automatically it would make for slippery paws at inopportune times.

While I can appreciate the desire to maintain order in the midst of chaos, and I can certainly see why radio is essential for that, I’ll never understand the people who say they’re into ham radio because they don’t want to be censored or intercepted in a time of crisis. Ham radio is insecure by design. Your dox yourself every time you give your call sign.

Oh this screenshot was taken years ago. I got my extra ticket in 2021 (first licensed in 2019). I just keep coming back to it because of how on the nose it is.

I’ve actually been away from the hobby for the most part for about 2 years, and am trying to find ways to get back into it.

Yes, I am talking about Lemmy posts.

Rather than continuously adding to the OP, I’m going to post replies. Feel free to comment either on the root of the thread or as a reply to a specific comment.

Here’s a geopolitical map of Focus, the yinrih’s home star system. As is conventional in a lot of sci-fi, the name of the star can serve as the name of the whole system. Humanity’s home system is referred to as Sol.

Random Facts about Each Body:

Focus

The Bright Way refers to a star hosting sapient life, especially their own, as a hearth star (not to be confused with a star hearth). All yinrih languages have a simple word for sun, but since humans can’t utter vulpithecine speech sounds we decided to give their star a nice classical name. The Latin word focus means hearth, and a star serves as one of the foci of an elliptical orbit, so the word seemed fitting all things considered.

Hearthside

The closest planet to Focus, Hearthside is tidally locked. The region around the substellar point is called The Nightless Desert. The capital city, located directly on the substellar point, is known as the City of Eternal Noon. There is a green belt running along the terminator. The City of Eternal Noon is the center of religious government of the Bright Way. Politically the planet is an ecclesiocratic republic, economically it is destributist (respecting private property while being aggressively anti-corporate). Companies must either be privately owned or cooperatives. There is no public stock market, and citizens are forbidden from holding a stake in a foreign company. Hearthside retains a unique language, but most citizens are proficient Commonthroat speakers as well.

Sweetwater

An ocean planet, Sweetwater is the innermost member of the Allied Worlds. It’s famous for its class disparity. There is a wealthy upper class living in underwater cities, and an underclass of surface-dwellers in roving ships and submarines. Some make a living fishing or mining, while others are pirates. There are a few small fixed islands, but there are also free-floating rafts of vegetation large and dense enough to support entire forests. These mobile islands have no fixed topography, and undulate along with the waves. As such it is nearly impossible to build fixed structures on them, and they are very popular with Atavists and others who seek to live a primitive lifestyle.

Yih

The cradle of the yinrih species, and one of only two planets in the galaxy to naturally give rise to life. The planet is the center of political power of the Allied Worlds. It is also the urheimat of the Commonthroat language. After the formation of the Allied Worlds, regional languages were slowly supplanted by Commonthroat across the AW, but substrate vocabulary remains.

Newhome

The first planet to be terraformed. The first wave of colonists started a machine-worshiping cult.

Welkinstead

The first of the two gas giants (or if you want to be pedantic, the only gas giant with Moonlitter being an ice giant). There are floating cities in the upper atmosphere that mine and refine economically exploitable gasses. There are also a few moons, and their inhabitants, called moonies, are seen as rustic and uncultured. The moony accent of Commonthroat carries many of the same stereotypes as the Southern American accent.

The Inner Belt

The first of the two asteroid belts, and home of the Spacer Confederacy. The SC is a less a unified polity and more a very loose collection of independent city states that group together solely to defend their sovereignty against bigger players. These city-states take the form of orbital colonies that go from asteroid to asteroid mining and selling the minerals in order to keep the lights on. One of these city-states is Wayfarers’ Haven, which started out as a refugee camp of Moonlitter citizens fleeing a Partisan border expansion. The Dewfall departs from Wayfarers’ Haven, making the tiny colony the first nonhuman polity to have diplomatic relations with Earth.

Moonlitter

An ice giant with many moons. Moonlitter is caught in the middle of the cold war between the AW and the Partisans. Its government is notoriously unstable, as both the AW and the Partisans fight for the hearts and minds of its citizens. Border skirmishes between Moonlitter and the Partisans are common. When Moonlitter allowed Welkinstead to establish a military outpost near their border, the Partisans retaliated by glassing the dwarf planet Pilgrims’ Rest. Fortunately the AW peacekeepers evacuated the residents to the inner belt before their home was destroyed, which is how Wayfarers’ Haven was founded.

The Outer Belt

A resource-rich region politically divided between Moonlitter and Partisan Territory. Both polities share a common language, Outlander, but the Partisan dialect is much more conservative thanks to government efforts to stave of encroachment of Allied Worlds media and with it the spread of Commonthroat.

Texan here. We learned Mexican Spanish (seseo, yeismo, ustedes for everyone, etc) It’s been years since I had to use it for my job but IIRC there’s a difference in the subjunctive verbs as well.

There are also distinct varieties of Spanish spoken in the US that differ from Mexican Spanish. As a general rule, if a common word has a similar-sounding English cognate (often false cognate) the cognate will be used. truck = troca instead of camión, concrete (as in cement) = concreto instead of hormigón, carpet = carpeta instead of alfombra, to park (a car) = parquear instead of estacionar, and so on. This is from my years working as a bilingual call center agent.

Much appreciated! Been thinking of looking for a writing community to have my work critiqued. I know I said on the Neocities page I’m not an aspiring author, but it would be nice knowing whether and how much I’ve improved over time.

Can I ask what’s your goal with this work

This is a playground to get lost in while daydreaming.

It feels like a great setting for a really dense wide scope novel

I have some stories set in this world, but the narrative and characters serve the worldbuilding and not the other way around.

How are you organising all your work?

I use Obsidian.

At first I was imagining Firefly as a sort of mystery box character, but they’re more of a one-man panopticon state.

While he does have a degree of direct control over the capital complex, in the vein of a genius loci, the low data rate of the ansible network means he can’t directly observe everything that’s going on in Partisan Territory, though the government would very much like to tell everyone that the Great Leader is always watching. He’s a deliberately ambiguous character. Did he initiate the genocide of Wayfarers, only relenting at the plea of his advisors? Or did the genocide start with the disorganized secularist warlord states that Firefly united under the Partisan banner, and Firefly put a stop to the atrocity after returning to Focus from his failed missionary journey? How did the the other two missionaries die during the time their womb ship was incommunicado? Did Firefly kill them in a nihilistic rage? Or did he make a final prayer to the Uncreated Light to save them as their amnions failed, only turning his back on his faith after the prayer went unanswered? Did he also die along with the other two missionaries, with the Partisans propping up his corpse a la Weekend At Bernie’s in order to have a unifying symbol to rally behind? Did he die some time in the intervening millennia? Surely sheer entropy would get to him eventually, suspended metabolism or not? If he is alive, is he sane, or have the millennia worn away his mind? Is he still a wanderer (apostate) after First Contact, or has he reconsidered his beliefs in light of the existence of other sophonts among the stars, and now wishes to embrace the natural death he’s fled from for 33 millennia? You get the picture.

sounds like you think a lot on ideology and utopias.

The Partisans are just my sink for all my grimdark ideas. The Lonely Galaxy is actually meant to be much more upbeat. The Partisans are mostly in the background. As far as ideologies go, there’s also the hyperlibertarian Spacer Confederacy, the capitalist Allied Worlds (which currently enjoys a degree of cultural and economic hegemony in the system), the unstable middle man between the AW and Partisan Territory that is Moonlitter, and the politically ecclesiocratic and economically distributist planet Hearthside.

The main thrust of this setting is that the yinrih are all alone, just like humanity, crying out into the blind uncaring cosmos. Our First Contact is also their First Contact. Most sci-fi involves a galaxy-spanning meta-civilization of countless alien races. Some works have humans all alone, but none I’m aware of have just one other species, just as surprised to meet us as we are to meet them.

What kinds of stories are you interested in telling with this?

Low stakes slice of life stuff, believe it or not. A human has to negotiate a yinrih bathroom, a yinrih and the human she’s lodging with have to deal with a broken air conditioner, a yinrih tries Texas BBQ for the first time, etc.

This looks interesting. I started learning Blender specifically to depict my conworld. This is the first time I’ve heard of Flowscape. It looks neat.

I wish I could find the quote, but I believe it was an old issue of QST (1914 I think). The writer spoke in almost religious terms of his experience tuning around looking for other stations, comparing it to disembodied souls floating through the ether searching for others to commune with. I wish I could feel the way he felt, but I’m too habituated to casual intercontinental communication.

The closest thing I can think of is my experience of the early web, where I was able to see the weather conditions at my grandparents’ house thousands of miles away.

I didn’t even get into the fact that amnions are also abused for recreational purposes. Abusers are called gelheads (or gel-heads, gel heads, etc), since the suspended person is completely submerged in a substance called neurogel that acts as an interface between the nervous system and the amnion without any implants.

The Partisans also recruit addicted gel heads and plug their amnions into mini mechs, slowing their time perception so they can react with lightning speed to incoming attacks. Since their nervous system is seamlessly intigrated into the mech’s control suite they make for scary good pilots. These soldiers are called immortals, both because they don’t age while in suspension and because they’re legendarily hard to kill.

The reason why the Partisans use amnions so much is that the Bright Way regards them as sacred instruments of their holy work, and regard their misuse as sacrilege, most especially their use as oubliettes.

Firefly’s (the Partisan leader) similarity to the Emprah is actually a coincidence, but I’ve run with it after noticing it. The idea of an immortal leader was a reference to the Civilization games, and the the idea of an atheist regime ending up worshiping its leader is a reference to North Korea.

Firefly is in many ways a sci-fi lich, indeed, his detractors refer to him as the Lichlord. The Eternal Womb is his phylactery. His consciousness is still inside his physical body, but since the amnion can present whatever to his sensory system and since he can control connected electronics while in suspension, he can “project” himself into robotic avatars or plaster his likeness on vid screens. Ironically, he has forgotten the location of the Eternal Womb over the millennia, only knowing it’s squirrelled away somewhere in the capital complex, which takes up the entire surface and a good chunk of the interior of a dwarf planet.

Regarding yinrih psychology, they’re surprisingly relatable for humans with a few outlying exceptions mostly stemming from their reproductive strategy. The caudal ganglion isn’t actively involved in higher brain functions, but some neurological disorders or physical trauma that cause the partial or total severing of the connection between the two brains may cause the tail to move involuntarily. Amputation is usually the only resort in this case. The Dewfall’s mission controller, Lightray Lacktail, lacks a tail for precisely this reason.

The Partisans (space tree doggo Commies) in particular play with this time perception thing in a few ways. The leader of the Partisans is an apostate missionary who has permanently sealed himself in a suspension capsule called the Eternal Womb. Because his metabolic processes are halted while in suspension, he’s been alive for over 33 millennia, since the War of Dissolution. This is already an unfathomable age even for a species that lives for over 700 Earth years on average, but he has also slowed his subjective time perception so that from his perspective he’s been alive for millions of years, and may no longer be sane by the time of First Contact.

The Partisans also use this slowed time perception combined with the amnion’s ability to present arbitrary sensory input to the suspended person as a form of torture, drastically slowing the victim’s time perception while withholding any sensory input, including proprioception, so the victim experiences a thousand years of utter isolation while a mere six minutes pass outside. The amnions used for this purpose are called Oubliettes.

As for the inability to loose consciousness, Yinrih have two brains, the main brain located in the head, and a caudal ganglion whose original purpose was to control their prehensile tail, but has gained a secondary use as a hot-spare for the main brain should it be damaged or inactive. Yinrih do not sleep, but experience a 24 hour period of torpor every 12 days that serves the same purpose. Torpor is much like the unihemispherical slow wave sleep experienced by birds and marine mammals. A torpid yinrih is still conscious, but experiences dulled sensation and a feeling of detachment. If you’ve ever had cataract surgery, it’s like that.

The fact that yinrih can’t loose consciousness has forced them to get really creative when it comes to invasive surgery. Many surgeries can be performed by a tiny remotely operated micro mech that enters the patient’s body Fantastic Voyage style to operate without invasive incisions. But some procedures, such as amputations, have to resort to hallucinogens to send the patient on a wild drug trip so they don’t experience the trauma. These medical hallucinogens frequently find themselves on the streets as drugs of abuse under the street name mind candy, and it is common for medical professionals to go from healer to dealer.

The simulacrum generated by the amnion is necessary to keep the suspended person from going insane from a lack of sensory input. However, the sim itself can also be addictive, and potential missionaries must be rigorously screened and undertake a regimen of prayer and meditation while in sim to keep their minds anchored in reality.